The Amazing Spider-Man 2

All the usual hedges and qualifications don't apply to "The Amazing Spider-Man 2," that it's good if you like comic book movies, or fantasy action movies. Instead we find a very modern blockbuster that mixes the best of old and new. It has action sequences that will appeal to people looking for the usual pyrotechnics, but the core of the movie - and the source of the audience's interest - is emotion.

This is the case from the movie's first minute, which grabs the audience and plunges it into a high-stakes situation in which all the big emotional buttons are pressed - the love between parent and child, the love between wife and husband. In a flashback, we follow Peter Parker's parents in their first hours on the run from the law. They leave Peter with his aunt and uncle and soon find themselves fighting for their lives on board a private plane.

This is followed by another splashy action sequence, set in the present, involving a heist of plutonium, which gives us a chance to see Peter/Spider-Man in action, fighting crime on the streets of New York. The special effects have improved just in the last 10 years, so that when Spider-Man dives off a skyscraper and swings from building to building, he no longer looks like a stick figure bobbing around a computer screen. Instead the plummets bring on a feeling of vertigo.

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Even here, with back-to-back action scenes, there's no sense of the arbitrary about "The Amazing Spider-Man 2," no feeling as if the narrative is standing still while the filmmakers blow things up. The story is always moving forward, and it's always the story of a person - a young man who wants to do the right thing but finds himself dealing with unusual pressures and responsibilities. If he doesn't fight crime, the city falls apart. If he does, the police and press criticize him.

His most intense anxiety surrounds his girlfriend, Gwen (Emma Stone). At the end of the previous installment, he agreed to her father's last request - that for her safety, Peter should stay away from her. But their bond and their attraction are too intense to ignore, and anybody in the audience can see that this relationship just seems right. Garfield and Stone's rapport is appealing and unmistakable. They're physically at home with each other, and their conversations feel extemporaneous. Garfield and Stone are a couple offscreen, and here's a case where a real-life romance enhances the performances and benefits the movie.

The idea of two young people who desperately want to be together - who can't stay away from each other and yet somehow probably should - this situation has been engaging the passions and sympathies of audiences for at least 2,000 years. When Stone and Garfield are together onscreen, they practically glow. At the same time, the movie deftly reminds us, at every turn, that their relationship could be dangerous, and Peter's anxiety becomes ours. How rare it is with an action blockbuster to come out talking about the characters and the actors and not about explosions.

Even apart from the two leads, the acting is notably good, which means that director Marc Webb deserves praise. Embeth Davidtz probably doesn't have 10 lines in the entire movie, but she lingers in the mind as Peter's mother, as does Campbell Scott as her husband. Sally Field brings the full Sally package to her role as Peter's aunt, playing the character's emotional circumstances with the same intensity that she brought to Mary Lincoln.

Jamie Foxx makes an interesting character of Max Dillon/Electro, an electrical whiz whose needy nerdiness turns dangerous when he takes on superpowers. It's on Foxx's face, even as he's blasting dozens of police cars with electricity: He just wants to be loved.

Most promising of all, given where the story must go, is Dane DeHaan as the young billionaire Harry Osborn. He's charming, damaged and arrogant, vulnerable but vindictive, potentially a fine fellow, and yet one with just enough of a skew in his character to allow for horrible possibilities.

The special effects are seamless, so that the effects are felt without any notice of their being special. It just seems natural that Foxx should be able to go from a solid to an electrostatic state and back again, and that this should look as normal as anything else. As for the 3-D, see it that way if you particularly like 3-D, but it's not important to the movie. The plunges off buildings will work just as well in two dimensions.

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